Nicholas Katzenbach, N.J. native who worked under JFK and LBJ, dies at 90

Library of CongressDeputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, standing at right, confronts Alabama Gov. George Wallace in this 1963 photo.

Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, who famously faced down Alabama Gov. George Wallace on the steps of the University of Alabama, fought the FBI over wiretapping Martin Luther King Jr., was a trusted adviser to two presidents and enhanced the legacy of an already distinguished New Jersey family, died Tuesday night at his home in Skillman. He was 90.

He had been in failing health since breaking a hip last December, said his wife, Lydia Stokes Katzenbach.

Katzenbach, a graduate of Princeton and Yale, was brought to Washington by Robert Kennedy, who was looking for young, intelligent, passionate attorneys to staff his justice department.

In Katzenbach, Kennedy found his man.

The Bay of Pigs. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Integration of schools. The Warren Report. The Civil Rights Act. Vietnam. Katzenbach played a significant role in the defining moments of the decade.

"Throughout his long and singular career in the nation’s service, Nicholas Katzenbach combined realism, loyalty, and supreme equability with a bedrock devotion to principle, especially on civil rights," said Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz, a longtime friend. "He was one of his generation’s giants, and history will remember him."

Katzenbach’s son, John, said his father "passed away with the same quiet dignity that he displayed throughout his life."

"He never attempted to show his brilliance, he didn’t try to dazzle you," said retired state Supreme Court justice Stewart Pollock. "He didn’t have to. If you met him and didn’t know what he had done or who he had been, you wouldn’t have guessed it."

Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach was born in Philadelphia in 1922 to a prominent New Jersey family. He was the younger of two sons born to Edward Lawrence Katzenbach and the former Marie Louise Hilson. His father was a corporate lawyer and New Jersey’s attorney general from 1924-29. He died when Nicholas was 12. His mother was a member of the New Jersey state board of education for 44 years and its president for a decade. His middle name, with the unusual abbreviation deB., came from a forebear who had served as physician to Napoleon’s brother before emigrating to the United States.

Almost from the moment he arrived in Washington, Katzenbach was beset by tense moments and complicated legal battles with national and international implications. He wrote a brief supporting President John F. Kennedy’s decision to blockade Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis and helped secure the release of prisoners captured during the Bay of Pigs raid in 1961.

He became a deputy attorney general in 1963. In June of that year, the nation watched as he marched up the steps of the University of Alabama and confronted Wallace.

Wearing a suit, and with his bald-head glistening in the stifling southern sun, Katzenbach approached Foster auditorium, flanked by a federal marshal and a U.S. attorney. Wallace stood behind a lectern surrounded by white supporters. He stood opposed to federal authority to integration, symbolically attempting to block two black students from entering the university.

The picture of the two men facing one another became one of the era’s most sigmature images.

Katzenbach, at 6-foot-2, bent over the considerably shorter governor, who launched into a diatribe against the "central government" within view of the assembled television cameras.

Wallace, who had presidential ambitions, received the media attention he was seeking. But Katzenbach achieved something with far more lasting implications.

The two students were sent to their dormitories — Katzenbach had procured their room keys by saying Justice officials needed to do a security sweep — and registered without incident.

After Kennedy’s assassination, Katzenbach served under President Lyndon Johnson. His first assignment produced another lasting image. Johnson wanted to be sworn in as soon as possible. Katzenbach, in Washington, did not think a ceremony was needed, but agreed to read a Johnson aid the exact wording of the oath of office. The grim picture of Johnson being sworn in, with Jacqueline Kennedy at his side, was seared into the national conscious.

It was Katzenbach who insisted the FBI’s investigation into Kennedy assassination be made public to quell the rumor Lee Harvey Oswald had been part of a conspiracy.

"Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off," Katzenbach wrote in a memo three days after the assassination, "and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the communists."

In February 1965, Johnson picked Katzenbach as his attorney general, but he held the post for less than two years, feuding with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. A short time later, he was named an Undersecretary of State, a post he held for the remainder of the Johnson administration.

Katzenbach became IBM’s general counsel and helped represent the company in its fight against an anti-trust lawsuit filed by the government and eventually dismissed.

Resigning from IBM in 1986, Katzenbach went into private practice at the New Jersey-based firm of Riker, Danzig, Scherer, Hyland & Perretti.

There, he was the scholar with the corner office, recalled Glenn Clark, now a partner at the firm. The younger attorneys would walk into that office with a problem and emerge with a solution.

"You would go to discuss cases with him and he would always see an angle, a different way to approach it," Clark said. "He was a master at reducing tension, of getting into the middle and working things out."

Katzenbach’s children have moved out of the state. But several members of his family still live in Mercer County. Charles B. Katzenbach Jr., 63, an artist and home builder who lives in Hopewell, is a first cousin once removed.

Katzenbach said he did work on his elderly cousin’s homes in Princeton and Martha’s Vineyard, and on the apartment in a retirement home in Skillman where he spent the final months of his life.

"He would know the name of every plumber’s helper, and was and genuinely concerned about them," Katzenbach said."He had a tremendous wit, and even when he had trouble speaking, he had a twinkle in his eye and would acknowledge what was said that he was completely with it.

"I saw Nick last week," he said. "I mentioned to him that he had done for this country more than anybody knew."